On a review of "Hobbit Names Aren't From Kentucky" by David Bratman

My paper "Hobbit Names Aren't From Kentucky" was published in The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference, edited by Sarah Wells (Cheltenham: Tolkien Society, 2008), vol. 2, p. 164-68. The following was sent on June 7, 2011 as an e-mail to the scholar who reviewed it in Tolkien Studies 8 (2011), p. 206-8. No reply was received.

I've just had the privilege of reading your review of "The Ring Goes Ever
On," the proceedings of the 2005 Tolkien conference, in the new issue of
Tolkien Studies. It seems to me that you find my article "Hobbit Names
Aren't From Kentucky" somewhat puzzling, perhaps not helped by the editor's
failure to maintain the indentations of entire quoted paragraphs that were
in my submitted copy.

Since you took the trouble to write an extensive criticism, might I take a
little time to try to explain myself?

The paper does not, as you write, offer a "categorical rejection of
the possibility that Tolkien may have used some names that he remembered
hearing." In fact, you quote me denying such a rejection ("It's not
impossible that Barnett's tales contributed a soupcon to Tolkien's cauldron
of story," p. 168), so I don't know why you don't believe me as to my own
intent. Rather, as stated in the abstract, again on p. 165, and finally on
the last paragraph on p. 168, the paper's purpose is to use name statistics
to counter the casual factoid that hobbits are merely Kentucky country folk
transplanted intact to the Shire. The phrase "Hobbit Names Aren't From
Kentucky" doesn't mean that not a single hobbit name could possibly have
come from Kentucky, but that hobbit names as a group are not characteristic
of nor distinctive to Kentucky, and I'm sorry if that was not clear, though
I tried to make it clear.

You mention nicknames as a possible source, and that is indeed possible, but
Davenport was discussing surnames, and it's Davenport I wish to counter.
I'm not sure if you noticed that Davenport said he found all the hobbit
names in the Lexington and Shelbyville phone books (p. 165). This is why I
consider it significant that I found very few of them in 1999. You write
that it doesn't seem to occur to me that in 25 years demographics change,
but I did raise precisely that caution ("I don't know what Davenport may
have seen in his phone book in 1973 or 1979 or whenever he looked," p. 165),
which again you quote me as saying, so again I do not know why you don't
believe me as to what occurred to me. I think this datum is relevant
because it stretches credulity that almost all the names could vanish in
only 25 years. Shelbyville is not one of those Southern towns taken over by
Latino chicken-processing-plant workers, and neither is Lexington.

Nor did I "deride" (your word) Davenport for using the phone book, so the
implication of hypocrisy is misplaced. The phone book is a perfectly good
tool. Rather, I was ridiculing the findings he claimed to have made in it.
(I suspect he was grossly exaggerating.) It was therefore only fair play to
use his own tools against him. You suggest using 1910s data, but I was
limited to current data for reasons explained in the paper. Birth
certificates and cemeteries would not have helped, because I could not
search them systematically any more than I could the 1910 US census. Even
if I could, only the census would be a wide-ranging enough database to
establish what I wanted to know: both whether a surname absolutely did not
exist in Kentucky at a given date and, if it did exist, whether it tended
not to exist elsewhere in the US, making it distinctive to Kentucky.

I regret that, in all the wordage you devoted to my small, very minor paper,
you did not find room to mention my observation of Tolkien's own testimony
that he chose the names merely 1) because they were English, and 2) from his
own sense of folk etymology - which has nothing to do with regionalisms
within England, let alone within America. Of the second part of the paper,
all you report is that Tolkien could have come across certain prevalent
names in the West Midlands. Actually I said that he could have come across
all of the census-recorded names in the West Midlands (p. 167); my point
about the prevalent names was more subtle than that: that he might have
associated those as homelike, even as he appears to have treated other
names, like Gaukroger, as relatively exotic. This is speculative, but I
labeled it as such, and it's far less so than any association with Kentucky,
because this time the names, at least, were definitely actually there.

I'm sorry my paper didn't work for you. It was really little more than a
whimsical jaunt off the main point. But when I write "The Year's Work in
Tolkien Studies," I try to report accurately what the authors of the papers
I review said, and I appreciate it when I receive the same consideration.

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